On Wed, Mar 05, 2003 at 04:35:02PM +1300, Nick Phillips wrote:
> Consideration of the scenario of use of a modified but undistributed version
> of a program within the modifying organisation would also lead one to
> conclude that our interpretation of 2 as a whole is desirable, and likely
> to be the intention of the license's author(s).
Why does anyone care about modified copies that don't get distributed?
Has it occurred to anyone how difficult it would be to enforce such a
restriction? How is the copyright holder to know that such modification
has even happened?
The only practical purpose this could serve would be to inflate damages
in the event one were suing a party for copyright infringement under the
GPL, and determined during civil discovery that someone had modified a
GPL'ed work in a way that *would* have violated (2)(c), had they
distributed that modified version. And this "practical purpose" is just
an expression of rancorousness.
I feel pretty strongly that no restrictions *at all* should attach to
modification per se, but only to distribution of modifications.
What I do in the privacy of my own home is not any copyright holder's
damn business.
--
G. Branden Robinson | To Republicans, limited government
Debian GNU/Linux | means not assisting people they
branden@debian.org | would sooner see shoveled into mass
http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | graves. -- Kenneth R. Kahn